Why sales enablement is really a revenue execution system with Robin Schweitzer

Benjamin Ard (00:55) Welcome back to another episode of Content to Close. And today I'm joined by Robin. Robin, welcome to the show. Robin (01:01) Thank you for having me. Benjamin Ard (01:02) Yeah, Robin, I am excited about the conversation today. So many good things I want to dive into and learn from you. But before we do that, let's let the audience get to know you. If you could take a minute, explain your background, work history, and all that fun stuff, the audience would love to get to know who you are. Robin (01:19) Yeah, sure. I have a really unique background. I started in the sales arena, carrying a bag. And then I went over to the marketing side of things and then eventually over to sales enablement. And the way I would say that helped me is that it's like a triple threat. I understand marketing, I understand sales, and then the enablement piece, it's really a 360 of how to look at the business. And I had fun in each and every one of those departments. And I don't think that I would be as fully round as I am now without taking on the marketing and enablement piece. So the last piece got me into sales enablement, which I absolutely love. I think it's a critical, critical division for teams. And I'm looking forward to our conversation. Benjamin Ard (02:05) Love it. Robin, this is going to be exciting. And when we were emailing back and forth about figuring out a subject for today, you had this cool phrase about moving enablement out of the classroom and into live deals. And I love this philosophy. I love this idea. So what is that mindset where sales enablement is actually revenue enablement, revenue side, and how does that kind of compare and contrast to the traditional view where it's more training and maybe a cost center. How are those kind of different and how do you look at that differently? Robin (02:37) Yeah, I think I learned early in the enablement piece. Training and content absolutely is part of enablement, but it is a thin part of enablement. It is a piece of enablement. It is not enablement. I think the broad majority of folks think enablement equals training and content. And that's something that you really have to hit in the beginning of a conversation because it's not that. I call it a revenue execution system, right? And because it's really about the content, the training, yes, it has its place, but it's really about how does enablement help the deal cycle? How does it help the deal cycle? How does it help reps manage the deal cycle? And it's not about training and it's not about content. It's about clarity of deal strategy. It's about buyer alignment. It's about next steps. It's about really big pieces of how do you actually work with a client on the buying cycle and get them to buy from you because it's the right solution. And it's all about these big pieces of what I'll call the revenue execution system. Benjamin Ard (03:46) So when you look at that, and I love that frame of mind, that ability to say, how am I enabling sales to actually accomplish their objectives, generate revenue for the business? How do you transition away from the training and content only side and really start to impact more of the revenue generation for the company? Robin (04:02) Yeah. It's not easy. And I think a lot of companies are struggling with what that looks like. I do think AI is going to actually help that conversation instead of hurt it. Like a lot of people are feeling the pressure of AI. I think the way to do that is to really be, you know, the more that you focus on the data that you can get out of doing enablement. And what do I mean by that? So even the training and the content. I also started, let me back up, I started with when I went to Patronix specifically, said, let me tell you what I see enablement as. And I had pillars, big pillars, like I was describing. Sales rep readiness, pipeline management, deal execution. All the things that most companies think are under the one pillar. Those are the big pillars that I saw enablement being part of. And they're like, wow, those are great. They were thinking about the sales and training material, sales sheets, case studies. Video anything you think of that's gonna support sales. And I think you need those but you also need to know when and where to use them in and what time do you use them? It's not, you know, outside of the deal inside the deal. So I think the answer to your question, little long-winded, first set the tone for the company when you go in about what enablement can be instead of just fulfilling what they think it is. Have them think about what it can be. And if you might have to take baby steps and start with the content, the building of the content. But even when you're building the content, build it smart, like don't, more content on top of more content doesn't equal success. You have to realize what is the content you need, right? Like what do you need? What is happening during the sale cycle? Where's the stalling? Where's the fallout? Where's the things that you need to do to close a sale? I also will share that I did an exercise of mapping the execution of a buy, both on the buyer side and our side. So then I can look at that and say, okay, well, I can see there's 10 places where things could go crazy if we don't have kind of a methodology of how to get there. Benjamin Ard (06:07) I love that. That's amazing. So the next question I have is when you're making this transition and I love how you set the expectations. This is what sales enablement really looks like. It's not just the training and sales rep preparedness. It's in the live deal. It's going through the process. How do you transition? Let's say I'm at a business. I'm a sales enablement rep. We focus mostly on training and learning things like that. How do I start to, I don't want to say inject myself, but really participate in the live deal and start providing value. Like what are some of those first steps I can take to start helping out inside of the active revenue side of things? If traditionally I've just been doing training in the past. Robin (06:48) Yeah. Well, I think I would hope that the company is using something that will help you get data that will help you understand what's happening. Right. So maybe if it's the CRM being willing to get that information out of the CRM or a discipline in the CRM, you have to get data. You have to get that data. And if you can get that data, and start building a story about, hey, here's what I notice. This is how we train. Like one of the things that I always do is we train, get a SKO. You're at SKO, everybody's happy. And you see participation going like this and all of a sudden, they're right back to what they were doing a month after SKO. Well, you've got to make a commitment. We did, we made a commitment to whatever we trained in SKO. We went back individually trained and had little pod, little mini trainings, micro trainings around, okay, how are you applying it? And we made it about the deals, bring a current deal that you have and what you learned at SKO now. So we could get that muscle going about how does what they just told me in SKO work when I get back to my desk. So using the training and saying, okay, now bring me a real deal and let's together, let's see how this methodology we just talked about works. Benjamin Ard (07:50) I love that. I love that. So you're actually doing real time. Here's the deal that you're operating on. Let's do the training, but let's make this happen for this actual deal. I think that's so cool. Now I'm also a big believer in data. So when you're looking at this program and looking at enabling more revenue generation, as opposed to just training, it's, you know, the transition, like you said earlier, the classroom to live deals. How are you measuring the impact of those efforts to justify expansion, know what is or isn't hitting? What are you looking at? You mentioned like the different tools that you can use, but are there specific data points that really justify what you're doing in this space? Robin (08:39) Plenty. And I'll list just a couple of them. Let's start with threading. How many people have your sales rep engaged with? How many people are involved? What's the threading look like? What is the time frame between stages? What's the talk and listen ratio? To the company, everybody's recording calls now. Everybody's recording calls. And, you know, the talk and listen ratio is important. Even clustering around where there's a deal stall, where are deals stalling? Where are deals stalling? And I will share a live example. One of the things we did to increase close won rate at the prior company was by 12%. We were spending, we were spending about, I don't know, six, eight days in discovery and four weeks in proposal. Upside down, so lopsided. So when I saw that, I was like, we have a discovery problem. Right? And by discovering that pattern, what I uncovered was that my people are going in with discovery as one discovery when we really at this complex sale have three discoveries. And so my team broke it down into three different discoveries that were easy questions and things to take care of. And lo and behold, the things that would come out because they weren't doing proper discovery to stall the deal were taken care of. Now it didn't happen overnight, but that's an example of a signal that said to me, wait, we're only seven, eight days in discovery and we're four weeks, three weeks in proposal, what? I knew we had a problem. So that's a good example of a signal that we were able to peel back and go, oh, we gotta do discovery work. Benjamin Ard (10:08) And that's incredible. I love the story. I love the example. That is so cool. When you were doing that, did you find that it was helpful to have like a trial group or work with specific people before a full rollout? How did that actual testing and proving actually take place? Robin (10:25) Well, the first step was presenting the data to sales leadership, right? Cause they have, they can get the data too, but they just don't do it as much as we would like there. And so we kind of had to hold their hand on finding things that are important to them, get their attention. Like what? And I had them leaning forward when I had the data in front of them, like, yeah, you're eight weeks here and six weeks there. And they were leaning forward like what? And so I think picking things that are going to get leadership to buy in. That if we fix this, there might be something. It's almost like you could chase the number, but you got to change the behavior so you don't have to chase the number as much. And behavior change takes time and takes knowledge. Benjamin Ard (11:09) So another thing that I'm curious about, you talked about going to sales leadership as an enablement person who is embedding themselves in the sales process to really impact the revenue. Do you find it better to go through the leadership team? Are you working directly with reps? Is it a combination? Often when you're talking about we need to implement change. How are you getting the adoption of that change and what's kind of the pathway for that to take place? Robin (11:33) Yeah. Um, I think it's a parallel. I like to really, like the first thing I did was speak to sales leadership and reps because sales leadership has an opinion, reps have an opinion, C-suite has an opinion. And so I didn't even like go in with the idea of I'm collecting all of this. I went into my fact finding mission of C-suite, tell me about what you think about sales. Where do you think it's good? Where do you think it's bad? Then I went to the reps, asked the same question, then I went to sales leadership, and then I put my little four quadrant, my gosh thing together. And just getting in the mindset of each of the stakeholders that are really responsible for making it happen was very helpful for us. So I can use really interesting pain points that I know C-suite is saying to sales leadership and sales leadership is saying to sales. So I had credibility because I was able to say the things that they're hearing from their peers and their bosses and so I'm not coming in here, who's this lady that's coming in and trying to tell us how to do sales, right? And also listen to the pain points of sales. I took the pain points and I'm no dummy. If there's noise, I'm not going to put it on a sheet of paper. There's always noise from salespeople. But when you have a disconnect between something in the product and the marketplace with competition. I owe it to my sales team to bring it up to product or bring it up to C-suite. This isn't a sales problem. This is actually a product problem that we really have to discuss. And I think there's a couple of those things that I went to bat for the sales team where they were like, okay, she gets it. Benjamin Ard (13:04) I love that. Yeah, you're the advocate for them as well. You're helping kind of internally the perception from external resources and then their perception other ways. You're communicating all of that both ways. I love that. It's not the enablement of the reps, but it's also their enablement with the rest of the company, which is really cool. Love it. So Robin, we have run out of time. This was a great episode. I love talking about everything here. I love how you're focused on the revenue side. For anyone who is listening to this episode who would like to reach out and find you online, how and where can they find you? Robin (13:44) You can find me on LinkedIn, I'm there. And on social media, I'm on all the channels. So feel free to reach out. Send me a ping on LinkedIn. Benjamin Ard (13:54) Love it. Love it. For anyone listening, scroll down to the show notes, regardless of what platform you're on. Robin's LinkedIn profile will be linked right there. Go ahead and click on the link, connect with Robin, say hello. Again, Robin, thank you so much for the time and insights today. This has been amazing. Robin (14:09) It's been my pleasure. Thank you.